What a Body Knows 4: Why Do We Believe?

On this first day of June, I offer a final birthday-celebration selection from What a Body Knows!

This one concerns our desire for spirit...... what is it that we really want?

"When surfing for answers to the questions of life’s meaning and purpose, the options dazzle and overwhelm. Every worldview tells a story about what is real and true. Every human tells a story about what a given religion or philosophy means and why it is right. Amidst a weave of stories, personal and communal, shapes of culture emerge, a religion, a philosophy, a way of life.

Yet the differences among the options are less significant than what they share. When we breathe to move and move to breathe, we realize that every symbol, teaching, belief, or practice, philosophy, religion, or treatment plan, itself represents a pattern of movement — multiple patterns of mind, heart, body coordination. Each one is offering us an opportunity to discover inside ourselves the capacity to make the movements it represents, whether those movements involve cultivating a mind over body sense of ourselves, engaging a daily meditation practice, or believing in a vision of the promised land.

As we stretch to consider an idea, bend into a demonstrated posture, or organize our senses around a ritual, we exercise capacities for thinking and feeling and acting in ways other than we had previously experienced. We create and become new patterns of sensing and responding that unfold our talents and gifts.

With this perspective, we arrive at a new understanding of what it means to believe. If the effort of moving with a particular belief or practice ignites a blast of pleasure or joy or healing within us, then our immediate impression is that this symbol or teaching or practice is true, and it is. It is real and true for us because it has allowed us to discover something about ourselves that strikes us as who we are and want to be. Our movements are creating the network of relationships that is actually enabling our unfolding. We believe.

When we believe, then, we are exercising our power to name and bring into being a world we love that loves us. And by exercising this capacity, we stir in ourselves the feelings of vitality, direction, and belonging that our desire for spirit seeks as the condition for our ongoing well being. It is intoxicating.

At first this observation may trouble us. Isn’t there anything to believe or trust that is once and for all true? Are our beliefs and practices mere figments of imagination that we concoct for our own pleasure? Why believe or practice at all?

Breathing to move and moving to breathe, we know why we do. It is not to guarantee ourselves a certain ground or a safe delivery from pain. When we believe and when we practice, we provide ourselves with a sensory trainingthat we cannot get anywhere else. As we learn to make the movements prescribed to us by a given religious platform or program, we wake up to the creative power of our bodily becoming. As we bear witness to the changes in us that our believing and practicing effect, we know our capacity to change. We become aware, as nowhere else, of a basic fact of human bodily life: we are always bodies becoming. We are never not engaged in this process of creating and becoming new patterns of sensation and response. We are never not creating our values, our ideals, our gods, and the relationships by which we live.

We find ourselves believing, and believing in whatever we perceive as enabling us to thrive. God is true because God lives in me enabling me to be who I am.

Once we make this shift in how we experience our will to believe, we have the best criteria available to us for navigating the dizzying array of religious and spiritual options surrounding us. For if, in making the movements we are led to make by a given authority or text or context, we find ourselves separating from the very sensory awareness that is guiding us to seek them out, then we know: the relationship is not one that will support me in giving birth to myself. This is not true for me. I can’t believe.

On the other hand, if, in making the movements, we find ourselves enlivened, unfolded, and brimming with the pleasure of it, then we are inclined to name what is enabling us to become who we are as our religion, our faith, our practice. We make a commitment to let live what is ever enabling us to be. We join the community of those who are similarly moved. We proclaim its truth to all. And as we do, we make that matrix of relationships real: it is enabling us to give birth to ourselves. It is real because it lives in us. We are different.

People with different sets of talents and gifts will find their self-creating powers exercised by different approaches. Those with a large capacity to reason will find more pleasure and truth when engaging perspectives that offer rational arguments for their program. Those with a strong emotional life will warm to dimensions of religious life that emphasize devotion and love. Those with a vibrant kinetic, sensory orientation will gravitate towards forms of belief and practice that allow and encourage them to exercise this capacity for movement as an instrument of discernment.

In any case, a path will be true for me when the movements I am making as I learn to move with it are allowing me to name and make real the relationships that support me in giving birth to myself.

We are complicated. Our bodies are full of mystery. There are capacities for sensation and movement in us that we never even imagine possible. We may discover whole ranges of experience by accident. We may be led to explore other regions by the example of someone else’s account. We may experiment for years without uncovering that trigger that releases the desired responses within us. We may exert all of our efforts in one direction only to be swept sideways into novelty or bliss.

The patterns of movement we must make to unfold who we are are more complex than any rational account can delineate. The imagination of the Universe is far greater than ours. All along the way no one else can ever know or tell us how to awaken the unique patterns of creativity that we each are. It is our desire for spirit, our sensations of pleasure and pain, that provide us with the surest guides we have.

Discerning the wisdom of our desires is a life’s work. The work of a life. The work that a life is. The work that takes a life and more to complete. Yet at any moment along the way, if we are bending the power of our minds to the ongoing rhythms of our bodily becoming, we will find the vitality, the sense of direction, and the deep connection with life that satisfies our desire for spirit."

--What a Body Knows, chapter 23

It's Not (Just) About Food

I just read a book by a colleague of mine, Michelle Lelwica. Her book, Religion of Thinness, is brimming with insights on the sources and supports of eating disorders, including one I want to highlight here.

You can’t (just) think your way out of an eating disorder.

Lelwica explains why. By using categories drawn from the study of religion (myth, icon, ritual, morality, community, and salvation), she is able to document a set of phenomena in contemporary culture that function as a self-reinforcing system, what she calls a “religion.” People with eating disorders believe that by engaging in rituals of food manipulation (whether dieting, binging, purging, obsessing, calorie counting, or some combination of all), they will find the happiness and acceptance they desire.

The system works because the practices have real physiological effects that provide those who perform them with immediate feedback and concrete measures of success. People lose (or gain) weight; experience all manner of chemical rushes, sugars to endorphins, and in the process, cultivate a sensory awareness of these effects as proof that they are OK. The effects of the practices make the beliefs seem true.

Moreover, this net of beliefs and practices is not only self-reinforcing, but as Lelwica suggests, the needs it serves are real. Her discussion about what human “spirits” need resonates with what I describe in What a Body Knows as a “desire for spirit”: humans desire a sense of vitality, direction, and belonging that allows them to affirm their lives as worth living.

Manipulating food is one way to pursue the sense of satisfaction, and it is particularly powerful because it enlists another primal desire—a desire for an experience of nourishing ourselves. As I discuss in WBK, nourish and nurture are forever entwined. Eating disorders extend a mind-over-body diet mentality to life as a whole: if I were thin, if I could attain perfect control of my body, I could get the life I want.

For these reasons, then, you can’t think your way out of an eating disorder. It is not enough to develop a critical immunity to cultural images of thinness. It is not enough to modify behaviors. Nor is it enough to deal with whatever fear, pain, and stress might prompt you to buy into the “religion of thinness.” While all of these interventions are helpful to some extent, none work at the level at which an eating disorder functions as a(n unhealthy) religion. Its patterns of belief and practice, icons and values hook into a set of basic physical and emotional needs and provide tangible, if deadly, life-depleting results.

Healing from an eating disorder requires that you lose your religion. Losing your religion means finding a new one.

The path to doing so is challenging, for it requires shifting your most basic experience of being in the world at the level where you sense and respond to your own bodily self as well as the bodily selves of others; and from this shifted place, embracing or creating the beliefs, images, practices, values, and human communities that will support you in that care-full attention to your bodily self. It’s risky. Scary. The results aren’t guaranteed.

So how do you do it?
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Leif, 8 months yesterday, is standing. For the past month he has been pulling and pushing himself up onto his tiny feet at every turn and resting there for ten or twenty seconds at a time. His smile curls his cheeks into ruddy mounds; he waves his hands joyfully. Yet he has absolutely no interest in moving his feet. He will reach forward to the floor, sit backward on his rear, and even twist sideways to land on his hands, but his feet, rooted to the earth, won’t budge. It’s as if he is living up to his name, and trying to be a tree.

He reminds me: if you want to walk, you have to be willing to fall. Every time you take a step, for a fraction of an instant, you are aloft and moving through space. In that moment you must trust that the ground is going to be there for you, that your spine will connect to it through your legs, and that your center will hold you up.

How do we ever venture to take such a risk? There comes a moment when we are able to feel a pulse of energy that rises in ourselves and takes shape in our muscles as a desire to move. There comes a moment when we are willing to trust our bodily selves and allow new patterns of sensing and responding to walk us into a new world--a world of walking and walkers.
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In counseling her readers to lose the religion of thinness, Lelwica identifies alternative resources across a range of religious traditions, and guides readers through specific practices of mindfulness for heightening awareness of their sensations, and promoting inner peace.

All good. I would add as well that we need to engage in bodily practices that help us cultivate a sensory awareness of the movement that is making us. We need to remember what it takes to walk.

Sometimes practices of sitting and stillness can serve to reinforce the sensory education we receive in perceiving our bodies as material objects, there for us to control. To shift this experience at its root, we need practices that provide us with an experience of our bodily selves as something other than the mind over body self that the religion of thinness itself exemplifies. We need practices that help us learn how to discern, trust, and move with the wisdom of our own bodily selves—such as those I described in my last entry.

Such movement practices yield a network of energizing, vitalizing pleasures that are capable of holding their own against the immediacy of eating practices. They put us back into our bodily selves, so we are more able to feel and follow the arc of our eating pleasure. They provide us with a lived experience of discerning, trusting, and moving with impulses that arise in us. They thus provide us with an experiential ground that can support a matrix of beliefs, icons, and values that affirm this rhythm of bodily becoming.

As I explore in WBK, humans look to religion for the opportunity to exercise their ability to name and make real the world in which they want to live. It is by participating consciously in this process that we find the sense of vitality, direction, and belonging we need in order to affirm our lives as worthwhile. It is not so much about identifying the right belief or the right practice or the right vision of life as much as it is about the willingness to take the risk of finding ways of being that support us in becoming who we are and unfolding what we have to give. It's not just about food.

We can learn to launch ourselves forward into space, willing and able to inhabit space, take up space, and move through it, because we are alive. Step by step, we walk into a new world.

See my 5-star amazon review of Religion of Thinness!

Beyond the Middle

Lately, I’ve been laughing. Sometimes a soft chuckle, other times a belly guffaw, and once a side-splitting, tear-jerking, silent seizing. The political satire sailing back and forth is hilarious.

Smiling over Maureen Dowd’s piece in the Sunday New York Times, however, my grin turned upside down. It occurred to me: no one who intends to vote for McCain or Palin will find this funny.

Dowd is one of many who are not only preaching to the choir but doing so in a way that reinforces the wall between parties with layers of scorn. We who read and laugh can’t possibly imagine that someone would actually buy what the other camp is selling! Mockery fosters hostility, intolerance, and elitism—all in fun. It isn’t possible to communicate with them, so why even try? Our opponents are just plain wrong.

Except that they aren’t. Any side is a side. Isn’t there a better way?
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Tilting towards the political these last few weeks, it may seem that my blog is leaning far beyond its intended scope of our desires for food, sex, and spirit. However, what is at stake in this election, when it comes right down to it, is precisely our desire for spirit.

How so? As noted, a desire for spirit is a desire for a sense of vitality, direction, and belonging that gets people out of bed in the morning, willing to believe that life is worth living. It is a desire that finds its pleasure as we participate consciously in naming and bringing into being a world we love that loves us. It is a desire that makes its wisdom known in patterns of chronic frustration, depression, and despair.

People across the nation are feeling acutely a frustration with the current administration and its policies—a frustration that signals to us that we want more. We want new energy, a new direction, and a renewed sense of belonging to a country of which we are proud. We want change in which we can believe, and both parties are selling it to us.

However, if you take a look, you can see that the positions offered in response to this frustrated desire fan out along the mind over body spectrum we have identified in relation to our desires for food, sex, and spirit. At this end, one party is calling individuals to develop greater will power and self-restraint among individuals and corporations. At that end, one party is calling for more effective government regulation of and involvement in key industries and services.

The response to the recent collapse of Lehman Brothers investment bank is case in point. McCain attributes the crises to excessive greed, while Obama points to the absence of government regulation over the derivatives markets.

Both responses, however, reinforce the mind over body logic they share. Whether the mind in question is individual or collective, the dynamic is the same: we are led to believe that we will bring into being the world we want to see by exercising the power of mind to rule over the renegade bodies that are abusing our precious freedoms.

From this perspective, both visions of change are offering us more of the same. There are differences and those differences matter, but they do not matter enough to make a real difference.

We, as individuals and as a country, need our own version of what I have been describing in these posts as an “experience shift”: we must learn to discern the wisdom in our sensations of frustrated desire.
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Simply promising more or less government is way too crude a tool to deal with the issues of our time. The messy negotiations conducted amidst tightly strung webs of conflicting commitments merit careful attention—but not just that. Change happens so quickly that we need to be able to recognize when and how government action is necessary, and when it isn’t. We need to cultivate a sensory awareness of how the movements we are making--as individuals, communities, corporations, and country—are making us. This is not just a question of accountability; it is rather a willingness to discern the impulses to move locked in patterns of chronic pain and frustration and see them as something other than either a matter of will power or government control.

When we examine the movements contributing to our current dissatisfaction, we find a common thread: inequality. The movements we make when we think and feel and act as if we were minds over bodies serve to concentrate power in the hands of those who reinforce this belief. Ironically, we place our faith in larger and larger institutions that promise to give us the economic, political, personal, or spiritual autonomy over our material circumstances that our mind over body training teaches us to want. Political parties included.

This inequality is soon structural. It is what we are creating—not as a result of excessive greed or lack of government oversight, but as a result of our willingness to create relationships with those who promise us the mind over body power we believe will grant us the sense of vitality, direction, and belonging we seek.

The crux of the matter is this: are we moving in ways that foster relationships in which all entities benefit? This is the question that a government by the people and for the people must answer. For if one party to an exchange has a much greater concentration of power, then that is where government is needed—to ensure a mutually enabling relationship.

Banks depend upon the solvency of individuals as much as individuals depend upon the solvency of banks. If the benefits accruing from a relationship are one-sided, then it is in everyone’s interest to provide a counterbalance—not regulation for the sake of regulation, but an articulated sense of the common good, the shared principles and rules that enable the play to continue.


This logic is what we have been working with of the past few months: In so far as we are intent on naming and bringing into being a world we love that loves us, we are obligated to let others live as the condition of our own freedom. This is something that we all must embrace—our ends both tempered and empowered by what we share. This country. This planet. This race. This tomato.


Next Week: Enabling Freedom

Living It: The Palin Pick

I have to confess, I am obsessed with Sarah Palin. (Who isn’t?)

It is also time to shake up my blog. (Anyone know of a vice-blogger I could hire—maybe one from Alaska? No experience required.)

I have written to the edge of my plan—spending two months each making the case that there is wisdom in our desires for food, sex, and then spirit in turn. All along I have hinted that our desires are entwined—that we cannot address our dissatisfaction or find the wisdom in one realm without involving the others. Now it is time to investigate.

Which happily brings us back to Sarah Palin, McCain’s VP pick. Hers is a story in which human desires for sex and spirit are enchantingly entwined. We are missing the significance of it.

Palin eloped with her high school sweetheart and gave birth to her first son eight months later; she continued her pregnancy with infant son Trig, knowing he had Downs, and her 17 year old daughter Bristol is 5 months pregnant and planning to marry the father. At every turn Palin’s attitude to sex and its fruits is guided by her Christian faith: abstinence-only sex education, no abortion (except where a mother is in danger), marriage as one man-one woman, with child/ren.

Of course, her personal life is irrelevant to her ability to lead, say Republicans and Democrats alike. What counts is her executive experience, her intelligence, her charisma, her promise. Except that they don’t. For every bend in Palin’s personal story is further proof of what matters most to the social conservatives who rally around her: namely, her belief.

Representatives of the religious right are embracing her joyously with open arms as one of them—as someone who believes. To them she is someone who values life, commitment, family, love, and God. There is no one better for the White House. Period.

How can this be?
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Democrats and some republicans are dismayed, calling McCain’s move a distraction from the major issues (e.g., economy, environment, health care and the war in Iraq); a sign of weakness (caving to the religious right), cynicism (who cares whether the VP has any experience), or desperation (the Hail Mary pass of a losing team).

Yet the fact is, McCain’s breathtaking move scored every point he wanted to make. He wrested media, web, and public attention from Obama; energized his campaign, his party, and its conservative base; refreshed his image as a maverick and change agent; undercut Obama’s case against him, and made his ticket as potentially-historic a reign as Obama-Biden’s.

Even more important, however, is what is implied in the response of social conservatives and the religious right. McCain shifted the race to a terrain where Reagan and Bush won regardless of their (lack of) international experience or positions on the issues—a terrain where what counts is what you believe. McCain made the race about whether we live in a world where life is holy, good triumphs over evil, and the progress we want is assured. It is not an easy position to oppose.
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In a thoughtful essay on the Palin choice and the political mind, George Lakoff makes the distinction between “realities” (issues named above) and “symbolism.” He argues that McCain had no hope of winning based on the former given his ties to Bush and so had to rely on the latter. With the Palin pick, Lakoff argues, McCain’s ticket is now strong in symbolism. Palin not only believes what she believes, she lives it. She is thus a symbol of integrity, of the power of belief in our lives, of what is possible when you, as an individual, believe.

Lakoff praises Obama for being strong on symbolism too—with his descriptions of a democratic America as a place where people care about one another and help one another to succeed. Nevertheless, he urges Democrats not to fall into the trap of arguing over “realities” while ignoring the symbolic dimension of what they offer. Democrats must also provide frameworks and narratives—visions of who Americans are—that enable people to affirm the solutions offered as moral and right, and not just effective. Otherwise, their arguments will fall short of what motivates people. Heart. Love. Desire.
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So too, there is even more at work here than symbolism—which is where sex and spirit come in again. In choosing Palin, the network of belief that McCain is tapping is not solely conservative or Christian. It involves patterns of sensation and response common to Americans across parties: namely, the lived sense of ourselves minds dwelling in and over bodies whose best recourse in facing any problem is to use the power of those minds to exert control over our bodies and those of others.

Palin’s story authorizes the mind over body belief system that underlies McCain’s policies. She lives it in relation to our most basic human desires for sex and spirit. She confirms for us that all we need to do is to exercise the power of our minds over our desiring bodies—or over the bodies of women, terrorists, animals, earth—in order to get the physical intimacy and love, the sense of vitality, direction, and belonging, that we most want.
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Still critics howl: none of these strategies—abstinence, war, or more petroleum fuels—works! The evidence is clear.

To those who share a mind over body sense of self, however, the fact that these strategies don’t work does not necessarily invalidate the framework, for it might be that they just haven’t worked yet. For those who believe that belief is what matters, the apparent failure is a call for more—more restraint, more war, more drilling. They want that world in which life is good, pleasurable, and meaning-full.

In response, simply arguing for abortion rights, an end to the war, or energy independence does not go far enough in addressing the underlying issues. What we need in addition is a vision of life that allows us to believe in these responses as right--not just because they fix a problem, but because they create the conditions within which we, as humans, can thrive, to the extent they do. What we need is a vision of life that allows us to welcome the failures of the noted strategies as vital information about how to move differently to do what they intend: honor and protect life.
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Moving beyond this impasse requires the kind of experience shift I have been describing, where we dislodge the sense of ourselves as minds over bodies and learn to discern the wisdom in our sensations of discomfort. It involves articulating a moral universe rooted in a sensory awareness of ourselves as the movement that is making us.

Next week: What would that look like?

Dis/connected

I just spent a week taking care of four kids and three cows at the Washington County Fair, a major agricultural event in this region for over a century. I had help. Geoff and I took turns watching the kids who watched the cows. The other of us would skip home during the day, returning at night to a happening whose fun, food, and festivities can amount to an all-out sensory assault, depending on how deeply you imbibe.

At one end are the amusement rides, where you strap yourself onto a pop-up truck bed that hurls, twists, drops, spins, shakes, and otherwise throttles you through space while you passively receive a barrage of thrills.

To get to the rides you walk through clouds of spiced grease, emanating from rows of container cars, peddling fried you-name-it: potatoes, onions, zucchini, chicken, steak, fish, cheese, and of course, dough, served in large tubs or plate sized dog bowls. Next door you can get soda, lemonade, or mix your own fruit slush in liter cups with fast flowing, wide mouth straws. A good dose makes the rides all the more amusing.

At the other end of the Fair are the pulls: tractors, trucks, and ATVs tug various weights to see how can pull the most, farthest, and fastest, belching out plumes and fumes of exhaust. Mufflers are optional.

In between rides and pulls, you find barn after barn of farm animals: horses, cows, sheep, goats, chickens, and rabbits of various shapes, sizes, and breeds, whose time tied and caged in close quarters is relieved by an occasional trip to the show ring, the showers, or the milking pen.

Three Jersey cows in one of those barns are our responsibility. Or rather, my kids’ responsibility. They are on duty 6 AM to 10 PM, in charge of every drop of matter that goes in or comes out of their animals. It is expected that they will wait vigilantly, ever ready for the "phone call" they try to catch with a shovel on the way down. So the six of us live on the grounds, in a tent, shuttling back and forth from home for staples that come from another land—fruit, salad, pasta, and whole wheat bread.

This is farm country. The Fair was once a time for isolated farmers to gather together for the week, share their wares, strut their strengths, and build community. Now, it seems we are making machines, and the machines are making us. Various competitions prize cows as milk-making machines; sheep as wool-making machines; chickens as egg-laying machines. Our horses are simply replaced by horse-powered machines. And through it all, we become pleasure machines, seeking the satisfaction for which we long by overriding and overwhelming our sensory selves.

It is fun! A feast! A blast! Yes. But it also offers a vivid snapshot of who we are. In lives where we regularly practice overriding our sensory selves, the Fair is less of an escape than it is a place to reinforce the sense of our selves we are already practicing. Mind over body. It's just that easy.

A periodic override of the senses can feel energizing. Rejuvenating. It can charge open new sensory spans, spurring new possibilities for our becoming. But when the sensory assault is seamless, relentless, we lose sensitivity rather than gain it. To register the same pleasure response, we need more. The warning signs are there: the movements we are making are making us addicted to a constant stream of sensory stimuli to fund our desire for the sense of vitality, direction, and belonging we lack.
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Jump now from the Fair to the problem which with we ended last week: navigating religious differences. The two are related. For what is happening to our farm life is happening to our religions too. Networked, globalized, and high tech, we are making (ourselves into) machines.

It is one of the ironies of our time. Technology links us more closely than we have ever been. We send our messages of hope, peace, and love across vast distances instantaneously. Yet individuals are also more alienated and isolated, more in conflict with those who think and feel and act differently than they do. Discussion and dissension among and within religious groups is louder than ever.

Some commentators explain this paradox in terms of increased exposure. There simply aren’t the buffers between peoples and groups that once gave them the space to tolerate one another. What we know is near, we fear.

There is another explanation, however, and it has to do with our mind over body sensory education. Our globally networking technologies are educating our senses to expect a constant stream of stimuli. We regularly, eagerly, even willfully seek out a sensory overload that fills us up, and makes us feel important, happy, loved. Even at the Fair.

Yet the more we depend on our mechanical or electronic devices to connect us with nature or with the world, the more separated we become from the sensory awareness of our own bodily movement. And it is this sensory awareness that provides us with our lived, living connection to ourselves and others. Without it, we stay in touch with others but not ourselves. Disconnected with ourselves, we grow less tolerant of others.

Competition among religions is fierce. With so many lives in the balance, competitors drawing on business and marketing techniques designed to snare our sensory selves—endlessly repeated sound bites, catchy logos, tear-jerking tales, emotionally entrancing rhythms, tunes, and movements. The competition forces a homogenization along the axes of the battle: each religious representative stakes a claim to truth and knowledge, exercising the right to believe. Without a sensory awareness of our own bodily becoming, we lose the ability to perceive a religious alternative as anything but a threat to our existence. (My) Truth versus your truth.
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When we cultivate a sensory awareness of our own bodily becoming, we acquire two precious things: a sense of how we are thoroughly dependent on our relationships with others to be who we are; and a sense of how everyone else in the universe is similarly webbed.

No one can thrive in a world devastated by war or environmental decimation. We are related in more ways that we can think or know. Humans need each other. We need to learn how to live with one another. And no amount of arguing towards a rational program will work unless we are aware of how the movements we are making are making us. What is enabling us to argue as we do? Why? How is it that what we believe has Authority for us?

Once we understand how our movements make us able to believe and think as we do, then we also understand how different movements made by different others would find expression in different beliefs and reasons and thoughts. We still may not agree. We may vehemently disagree, but instead of simply butting heads, we can appreciate the different networks of relationships that have enabled each position to emerge. We can begin to appreciate the trajectories for growth present in each as well, and move with them. For that, however, we need quiet time to think and wonder and dream, and to cultivate the sensory awareness of the movement making us.
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The path to peace begins with our bodies and in our bodies because our bodies are irreducibly relational. It begins with working to create environments where we can attend to our humanity… and live it. It is in doing this work, whatever shape or form it takes, we will find the sense of vitality, direction, and belonging we seek.

As fun as the Fair was, I am happy to be home.

Next Week: Living it.

Athletes of god

The Olympics are on, in case you haven’t noticed. Once again we are awed into submission to our television sets and webcasts by bodies—the bodies of these women and men—reaching, twisting, bending, spinning, flipping, thrusting, hurling, heaving, kicking, rowing, and running. We are impressed and again amazed by the concentration focused, the effort expended, the will to win demonstrated time and again in extraordinary bodily movements.

Close, yet so far. On the one hand, these bodies are just that—bodies like ours. Their movements are ordinary, basic to the workings of nearly every healthy human on the planet. On the other hand, we can hardly imagine making such extreme versions of those movements. We come away strangely rapt, somewhat inspired, giddy, determined, and humbled all at once.

Yet what rivets us in the end, what we celebrate and cheer, is not the particular accomplishments, as great as they are. It is the human power to become: the basic capacity of bodies to become something other than what they once were, whether swimmer, gymnast, runner, shooter, equestrian, fencer—someone who can empty his or herself, mind, heart, and soul, into a split-second breathtaking bodily act of extraordinary precision and grace.

What we celebrate and cheer is the power of bodily becoming. You might call it the spirituality of sports.
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Inhaling. Exhaling. The movements of breathing, the basic rhythm accompanying and enabling every moment, every movement, of our lives. Inhaling, we take in the possibilities that await us—the resources that may become us. Exhaling we release what we were, to become something new.

Inhaling. Exhaling. Present in this basic oscillating rhythm is a moment where we are not—a moment between who we were and who we now are. It is a moment of transcendence—a moment when we are transcending ourselves, becoming other to ourselves, moving beyond ourselves, and becoming something else. Someone else.

Are you breathing?
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It is tempting to think of sports and spirituality as two distinct realms of life. We tend to think that in sports, we use the power of our minds and wills to push the limits of our physical bodies, whereas, in our religious and spiritual paths, we plumb the heights and depths of our spirit or soul, expanding our horizons beyond our finite bodies, bound as they are by time and space.

The distinction is a false one. For our spirituality is itself an expression of our bodily becoming. Our bodies our infinite, not our minds, and they are infinite in the range of movements they can potentially make—movements that include believing, breathing, and bounding over a pole.

Spirituality, like sports, involves a rigorous education of the senses to certain possibilities of experience.

A gymnast learns to notice the give of a parallel bar, the spring of the mat, the curve of the ring, the tilt of the horse, and spontaneously make the micro adjustments needed to align his intention and action.

A member of a religious group learns to move with the melody of a song, the cadence of a chant, the names and images of god. A member learns to make the gestures of prayer, think with the arc of repeated narratives, pay attention for the anticipated length of a ritual, and so too, learn to make spontaneous micro adjustments that align her heart and mind and body with the beliefs and intentions expressed.

In each case the apparatus—whether material or conceptual—provides the one who practices with an ability to develop an acute awareness of a given sensory range, and devote himself or herself to the perfection of certain virtues, the completion of desired tasks. Each offers a particular course and context, a training ground and goal for our bodily becoming.
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Nevertheless, there is a difference, and one worth noting. What distinguishes sport from spiritual is the moment in the rhythm of bodily becoming that each values as worthy of sustained attention.

In our spiritual lives, we are drawn to various tests and challenges that exercise that moment of our bodily becoming when we become other to ourselves—that moment when we move beyond who we are, expanding beyond our myriad fears and insecurities, troubles and ill—to connect with a source or presence or energy or whole that is greater than we are. We inhale and absorb visions of who we are and what we can be. Doing so, we strengthen our capacity to transcend.

In pursuing excellence in sports, we exercise that moment of our bodily becoming where we become other, realizing, in our physical actions, what we desire. Making the goal. Winning the prize. Overcoming all obstacles.

The two are not mutually exclusive. At the extremes of practice in either case, the difference is negligible. Our sensory and spiritual selves, inhaling and exhaling, are fully entwined in the pure presence of awareness—the action of the moment.

It is this entwining, really, that we celebrate. It is what we yearn for in everything we do. It is what makes anything satisfying to do. Finding it, realizing it, is what gives us the sense of vitality, direction, and belonging that will satisfy our desire for spirit. We become, in the words of one faith, "athletes of god."

Next week: Why and how this model of spirituality can help us in a world torn by religious conflict.

Where is the Spirit?

Back from vacation!

I was discussing my understanding of our desire for spirit with a colleague this week. He asked: where is the spirit in all this?

I knew what he meant. I talk of vitality, direction, and belonging, all worthwhile elements of life, for sure. But, like many definitions of religion on the books, it seems like my definition reduces our desire for spirit to something psychological or social, to a function or use, such as personal happiness, communal cohesion, moral up-building, or the passing on of tradition.

Where is the spirit in spirit? Where is the sacred, the holy, the transcendent Other? What about God?
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I have been reading about Rick Warren these days. It is hard not to. Not only is he the founding pastor of one of the largest churches in the United States, the author of the best-selling Purpose Driven Life, and a global activist, he is also the host of an upcoming “civil forum” between Obama and McCain. Commentators are heralding Warren as a new breed of evangelical leader, one who is broadening the politics of the Christian right beyond party lines and divisive issues to include health care, poverty, illiteracy, and global warming.

Pondering the many facets of his story, one thing rivets our attention: Warren claims that his purpose is God’s. As Warren insists, it is not about him. It is about God. It is about doing God’s Will. Doing God’s Work. God spoke to him. Warren’s success seems to confirm it.

We want what he has. We want that sense of vitality, direction and belonging—we want an unquestionable capital-A Authority to tell us that our lives are worthwhile and worth living. Our desire for spirit wants it.
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From the perspective I have been developing here, Warren’s conviction serves him well. It energizes him into action, providing him with a seemingly boundless sense of vitality. It guides him in his daily tasks: he has a mission, a clear direction. And, his specifically Christian commitment, ironically enough, provides him with a strong sense of belonging not only to his church, but to his community, his country, and his world.

But we wonder too. How can Warren be so sure? Was it really God speaking to him? (Can God speak to me? What would God say?)
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All we know comes to us through our senses. As we are born and grow, our senses evolve as the pathways through which our inner consciousness and outer awareness come to exist for us at all.

We are familiar with five primary senses—touch, smell, taste, sight, hearing—but the dimensions of each go far beyond the immediate impressions they register. As we use our senses, we open up an internal sensory space. We remember what we sensed; we anticipate what we will sense; we imagine what we might sense. And these memories, anticipations, and imaginings come together as a rich mesh that sifts our sensations. We learn to sense. We educate our senses to notice, to recognize, to compare and contrast.

An eye scans, an eardrum vibrates, nose and skin hairs tremble. We move; things appear to us. We create and become the patterns of sensation and response that orient and guide us in the world.

All that we can ever know or think or feel, then, arises in us by virtue of our sensing, moving bodily selves. Even when we believe we hear God speaking to us, even when we believe we encounter the presence of something Other we are, even when we enter into a state of otherworldly consciousness, we do so because of what our sensing, moving selves have sensed, are sensing, and can imagine sensing.

Which is not to say there is no God or spirits or states of altered consciousness. It is only to say that we will not be able to experience and know any of these things unless we believe in the possibility, educate our senses along the lines of those beliefs, and bend ourselves to listen.
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I remember a time when I was obsessed with the Will of God for my life. I was paralyzed, unable to move, constantly in tears. I wanted some Voice to speak to me out of Nowhere, loudly and clearly, telling me in no unquestionable terms who I was, where I should go, what I should do with my life. I prayed to God desperately, alone and with others. I read the Bible constantly, looking for clues. I attended church regularly, hoping for a sign. Nothing.

I finally talked with a pastor who said: Sounds like you’ve been working pretty hard on God. Why don’t you let God work on you.

I let it all go. Everything. God, Will, worry, faith. Whatever comes back will be mine. I walked and walked. I healed. Perhaps God isn’t limited to words. Perhaps God is speaking to me through what I desire most.
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“You were not put on this earth for your own satisfaction. You were not put on this earth for your own fulfillment. You were not put on this earth for your own happiness. God made you for His purposes.” –Rick Warren

Warren's teaching seems to go against everything I am writing. The only desire that matters here is God’s. God’s Will not yours. God’s Will is why you exist. God’s purpose will satisfy your desire for spirit. God versus you.

But the question remains: how do we know God’s Will for our lives? Only through our own senses. Only through the sensory, sensing movement of our bodily selves.

In the end it is you and only you who can know. You and only you who must make the decision to say, yes I know. Yes I have heard. In the end, it is all about you. But who are “you”?
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Can we know something that exists far beyond our sensory selves as their source and guide? Can we access other states of consciousness that allow us to know something we otherwise don’t? Can we escape from our ignorant, finite selves into some kind of larger intelligence?

The questions mislead us. For the questions presume that we are individuals, living as autonomous being. We are not. They presume that there is a clear break between the world inside of us and the world outside of us, between ourselves and everything else that exists. There is not.

We are moments in a seamless eternal web that is constantly moving, creating and becoming itself, at every level of existence, microscopic to macrocosmic. There is no inside or outside, only an infinite Movement of life becoming what it is. We are that movement, we participate in that movement, and we do so as we make the sensing movements that make us who we are.

The implications are radical. Our senses are not and cannot be merely physical. What we sense is always shaped and pulled by what we can imagine. For this reason, we sense-bound humans are inherently spiritual beings. We cannot not try to imagine what might be true. We cannot not keep creating sense-enabled pictures of the forces that blast through us—pictures of our relationship to these forces imaged in terms of words or visions or dream quest journeys. God speaking. Animal spirits guiding. Visions appearing. Healing energy rising.

All are possible. All can be real for us as life changing encounters. For we can imagine them. We can imagine them because of what we have sensed; we can sense them because of what we imagine. And what is it that constantly impels us to keep sensing, imagining, and encountering that which transcends what we have known? Our desire for spirit—our desire to find the sense of vitality, direction, and belonging we need in order to discover who we are and unfold what we have to give.
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The hard and fast distinction between spirit and sense is one that is fading in many realms, as people seek resources for embracing the spirituality of their bodily selves. However, the distinction continues to haunt us in the lingering sense of ourselves as minds who must choose or lose the best Will to authorize and reveal our bodies' way.

We need a model of spirituality, an understanding of spiritual practice, that emerges from the movement of our bodily selves. An understanding that begins with the idea: How you move shapes what you are able to sense as real and true.

Next week: a model of spirituality enabled by the cycle of breaths

The Cycle of Breaths: Revealed

I have called upon the cycle three times now, to help us sort through our desires for food, sex, and spirit, so that we can discern what it is these desires are trying to teach us about how to move in ways that will synchronize our health and well being. Each time, I have given an example of how to use it, when to use it, but I have not explained how and why it works.

So why does it work? Why should bending my attention to four measly breaths have any effect at all?

We are so practical. So rational. We want concrete proof before we try a new thing. So we surf for the ratings, the reviews, the consumer reports. We don’t want to be had. We don’t want to waste our time. We want to be informed. We want more.

Me too. So here I am, speaking to the rationalist in me.

The cycle of breaths works. Why?

1. A breather. Most basically, it provides us with a time out. The sheer fact of pulling our attention away from what we are doing for a mere 60 seconds can give us the space we need to reconsider our initial impulses, our emotional habits, our ingrained patterns of sensation and response. Such time and space is crucial—not so that we can attain mastery over ourselves or our desires, but so that we can stay in touch with our freedom. We want to be free to sense and respond in the moment and to the moment in ways that coordinate all of who we are and have been with what is going on now. The cycle of breaths gives us a minute to breathe.

2. A paradigm for problem solving. As a breather, the cycle of breaths is far from unique. Anything that times us out could serve the same function. The cycle of breaths is unique, however, in how it occupies that time. It provides us with a paradigm for problem solving—that is, for solving the kinds of problems that arise with the eruption of a tangled, frustrated, or otherwise very intense sensation of desire.

The cycle of breaths does this by leading us through four different perspectives on whatever it is we are feeling. With each shift in perspective, we find a bit more wiggle room. It is like trying to untie a knot, when you turn it one way and pull, then another and then pull again. It is the shifting from one perspective to another that helps us find our freedom in the moment—not freedom from our desires, but freedom to discern what they are telling us.

This paradigm works something like this. (Earth) Find your ground; steady yourself in the moment. (Air) Open up the feeling, and explore its reach and depth. (Fire) Find where that desire connects with what is most real and true for you; clarify its and your fiery core. (Water) Release that truth, let it flow, and listen for impulses to move. Repeat as needed.

3. Elemental reminders. This paradigm, however, is not your average formula for solving problems. It doesn’t direct us to fixate on an object or a thing or even on a part of ourselves. As we cycle through the breaths, it is the fact of paying attention to a force—a creative, elemental force that is making us who we are—that trips open each perspective.

We are always pushing against and being pushed up by the ground. We are always filling and emptying ourselves with air. We are always simmering in our vital core, and we are always flowing with the fluids passing in and through us. We are these elemental movements whether or not we pay attention to their rhythms. They are who we are. But when we do pay attention to them, we inevitably enhance our experience of them; we can deepen our engagement with them, and we can use these forces as resources for helping us create ourselves anew in the moment.

How? This recreation is subtle but strong. Just remembering that we walk on earth can help us let go of extraneous burdens we may be carrying. Just remembering that we are breathing, can give us a felt sense of the movement in our lives. Just attuning to our fiery core can give us a sense of agency and possibility. Just feeling the flow of our own blood and breath and fire and feelings can help us affirm our capacity to create, to become, and to move in ways that will not recreate whatever discomfort we are feeling.

Practicing this cycle, then, is not about imagining what might be true, or pretending that what we want to be true already is so, or conjuring up visions of spirits and entities from a parallel world to grant us our desires. It is rather about tapping into and releasing the ever present, ongoing, creative potential inherent within our moving bodies.

4. A catalyst for sensory awareness. Of course, as I have been saying all along, the cycle of breaths helps us cultivate a sensory awareness of the movement that is making us. Here I add that it does so because of the three qualities listed above.

Yet there is more here too. For when we allow ourselves to feel our connection to the ground, our breathing, our fiery core, our creative flow, we are drawn into a different experience of ourselves, others, and the worlds. Our whole sense of being in the world shifts, and we find that we are no longer operating out of a mind over body perspective.

This effect is the most powerful, for it carries with it the most radical possibilities. It is also the one that can only be confirmed through practice. With this shift in experience, we have what we need to discern wisdom in our desires. We have the sensory awareness to recognize our desires, the space and time and paradigm for honoring them as containing wisdom, the sense of freedom and creativity that enables us to notice the impulses to move they represent. And at that point, it just happens. We are able to feel and receive impulses to move in ways that will not recreate our dissatisfaction.

At that point, it is a mystery. Just as we never really know why or how an idea pops into our mind, so we can never really grasp why or how an impulse to move does either. What we do know, is that when we cultivate this vulnerability something will happen, and that something will emerge from, as an expression of, the sensory awareness we are cultivating. We will move in love.
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At its best, religion works in similar ways. It is not a matter of right belief or doctrine. Religion works and we believe when the movements we make as a member provide us with the breather, the paradigms for problem solving, the elemental reminders, and the sensory awareness that empower us to participate consciously in the rhythms of our own bodily becoming, creating a world we love that loves us.

Next week: More on religion. Or, why, in creating ourselves, we create the world.

Cycling through Depression

The drag of depression can come upon us at any time. Nagging at our edges, pulling us down. Often we are not expecting it. Clouds roll slowly in over our heads; or form suddenly, at the slightest provocation, and swarm into a massive thunderhead. The storm may build across years, or crash upon us all at once.

When it does, we can’t move. Things we once enjoyed pale; things we have to do weigh heavily. We may feel as if our life is falling apart, or too tightly wrapped in routine. Something is missing; something is wrong. Sometimes we are clear about what that missing thing is; sometimes everything is grey. Sadness soaks in or a lackluster indifference, perhaps laced with resentment. We don’t want to feel this way.

In such moments, the cycle of breaths (see side bar) can be a life-enabling intervention, for it opens up a sensory space in which we are able to discern this pain as an expression of our desire for spirit—we want more. More vitality, more direction, more belonging. And we can also appreciate the wisdom in these feelings guiding us to move differently, in ways that will support us in becoming who we are and unfolding what we have to give. Really?
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When depression grips or anxiety wrings, even if we don’t feel like doing anything, even if we can’t do anything, we can breathe. We are breathing, and we can allow our attention to rest on our breathing.

Earth breath (1/29). We can just let go and release the effort of trying to hold ourselves up. We can let ourselves lie down, sink down, touch down, breathing the length of our body into the floor.

As you breathe your cells toward the earth, notice the earth pressing back up at you. The ground is supporting you, holding you, doing all of the work for you. You can learn into it. You will not fall. You don’t have to do anything. You are breathing.

In such moments, the cycle of breaths opens a small safe place for us to affirm that we are. Who we are. Where we are. This is who I am right now. We stop fighting. I can only begin from where I am. I am here. Am here. Here. The earth, pressing back on us, gives us a sense we are lacking of our solidity, our weight, as we give ourselves to it.

Air breath (2/5). We breathe down into the earth, and breathing again, out through our skin into the air. Attending, we follow the breath in and out. Surfaces dissolve. Skin is porous.

As you breathe yourself light, the tight curl of your pain comes into view. Breathe around it, and slowly breathe through it, inviting it to unfold. As your sensation expands, it may grow large indeed, erupting in a cry of exasperation or despair. Breathing out, soften the jagged edges, and sigh with relief as you allow the sensation to be what it is. Your yearning. You want something you don’t have, but what? Possibilities shuffle before you. Food. Touch. Affirmation. Comfort. Security. Purpose. You feel constraints holding you back. You can’t. You won’t. You don’t have time or money. It is inappropriate. It is wrong.

As we breathe our pain open, our sense of it shifts. The movements I am making are making me. Split. Conflicted. At war with my own self. Out of control. Empty. Helpless. There is nothing I can do. We may realize how tired we are. How buried in work. How dazed by the noise and confusion of our lives. How immured in the walls of our dulled senses. We may also feel impulses to respond that flare with frustration at our weakness. We want to clamp down on ourselves or simply give up.

Breathing again, through the heart, down into the earth, up and out into the sky, let that breathe too. Let yourself breathe. I am here. I am doing this. I am breathing.

Fire breath (2/13). The fire breath sinks a deeper charge. We breathe down into the ground, out into the skin-touched light, and then into the cradle of our bellies. We follow the breath deep into our sensory folds and squeeze—pumping awareness through our flesh. We activate an inner sense of movement.

I am breathing and this pain is telling me that there are movements in me waiting to be made—movements crying out in frustration at being boxed in for so long. There are capacities to give—limbs of myself that are languishing for the relationships that will support their fruit. I can move. I am moving.

Water breath (2/19). As you squeeze and release, energy pulses through your self, up through your vital core. Subtle at first. Ripples then waves. It can be terrifying. For as energy flows, your feelings of depression, anxiety, or despair may grow stronger yet again. Clearer. This is what the movements I am making are killing in me.

So too, along with the terror comes an even stronger sensory awareness. The movements I am making as I breathe are making me into someone who wants to move differently, who can move differently. I am giving birth to myself as someone who is more than this pain. Who can find in this pain an impulse to move.
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When we practice the cycle of breaths, the shift in our experience of our pain happens instantly. Always. But sometimes, when the hurt is thick and layered, it can take time for the cycle of breaths to sink through and open up the possibilities for movement that lie within. We learn from our pain and pleasure how to give birth to ourselves as the people we are and want to be. It is the work of a moment, the work of a lifetime. This play is serious.

Next week: How and why the cycle of breaths (and religion) works.

Why Religion?

Understanding is overrated.

A Jungian therapist said it to me once. She was referring to my desire to understand my pain. At first I was horrified. I mean, I was a scholar of religion, keen on perfecting my ability to understand everything about everything and everyone, including myself. The comment struck deep, and my edifice of ideas trembled.

So what is the value of understanding? Particularly when it comes to matters of the heart and spirit?
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The question brings us to the ghost haunting our discussions of desire for spirit up until now: religion. In western culture, we tend to think of “religion” as referring to a system of beliefs and practices shared by a self-identified community of people. (Thank you, Emile Durkheim, and others.) When we want to know about a person’s religion, we ask, “What do you believe?” The implication is that religion is about people’s beliefs—what they think is true and good and beautiful. The implication is that being a part of a religion is a matter of understanding. It is a matter of deciding to believe that what its authorities and documents and history teach is indeed an accurate representation of what is. Choose it or lose it.

Here lies the trouble. An accurate representation. When religions make claims about what is absolute, infinite, transcendent or just plain true, they are making claims that cannot be proved by standards of scientific reason. Yet, we still operate with a sense that we can and should make rational decisions about participating in our religions based on whether or not they are true. If they are true, we believe, they will work to make us happy. They will satisfy our desire for spirit. We will know who, how, why, and for what we are. We will understand why we suffer.

This situation presents our rational minds with a conundrum. How are we to make a rational choice concerning which picture of what lies beyond reason is the best and truest?
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The situation can be unnerving. Not only is so much—if not everything—at stake, but there are so many competing possibilities, all marketing to us their visions of how happy and saved and right we will be if we believe what they do. The sheer bounty of options can provoke despair. It seems easiest simply to stick with what is familiar, dabble in many, or reject all equally. Thus we avoid the problem of having to choose what, in the end, cannot be chosen.

Or can’t it? Perhaps, when it comes to religion, understanding is overrated. Perhaps the reason why religion endures in our hearts and minds and cultures (if we can call religion an “it”) is not that it provides us with explanations for our suffering or for the origins of creation. Perhaps what we choose when we choose religion is not an understanding of the world, but something else.

Perhaps the value of religion—its purpose and efficacy—lies in the way it helps us discover and exercise our human bodily capacity for making and becoming who we are; for bringing into being the world in which we want to live—a world we love that loves us.
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Think about the religions you know. Yes, there are beliefs—one god, no god, many gods. Life is now; life will be then. Life as we know it is to be embraced, or then again rejected. There are also practices—physical actions people make with their bodies in prayer and worship, in song, and sometimes dance. There are also communities—groups of people who gather together to share in the same beliefs and perform the same actions.

However, “religion” is not any one of these things. Nor is it a simple sum of the parts. Something more is at stake here and must be to explain its stubborn persistence in human lives, especially given a world that forces it to defend itself constantly.

Religion is about making movement. Religion describes patterns of sensation and response—a complex weave of physical, emotional, intellectual movements that spur us to discover our capacity to make these movements. When we sing out or bow deeply, when we mediate for hours or twist our bodies into novel shapes, we are discovering our capacity to do so. We are feeling the pleasure—or pain—of making movements that make us able to think and feel and act as we do.

And when the movements we find ourselves making are ones that release us into a sense of greater power—when they help us to a sense of ourselves as capable of making them—then that religion works. It succeeds. We believe in it, because we know that we are different because of it. The proof lies in ourselves. In who we are becoming as we make the movements it encourages. We like the world that opens in and around us as we feel like this, sing like this, act like this--and yes, think like this.

In this view, religion is not about a picture, practice, or community, as much as it is a training ground for helping us learn to discern, trust, and move with the wisdom in our desire for spirit.
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Religion is a vital and inevitable part of human living. For what we do in religion exercises the creative reach of our bodily becoming as no other dimension of our society. It engages our full sensory range in the act of naming and making real our most remote and intimate horizons. To expect from religion that it provide us with answers is to limit our sense of our own bodily becoming to a matter of understanding. We are much more.

In religion we dream our dreams. We envision the world as it is, would be, could be, and should be. And as we do, we make it so. We participate in creation. And it is when we participate actively, in ways that unfold our potential to do so, that we feel the sense of vitality, direction, and belonging that lets us know that life is worth living. Worth loving.
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I remember a moment when Jordan was four years old. I was having a difficult moment and just blurted out, “You know, sometimes life is hard. And when it is, you just have to love it. You just have to love life.”

Jordan paused for a moment and replied, ”Yes, you gotta love life, for if you don’t love life, it won’t love you back.”

Next Week: Using the cycle of breaths to discern wisdom in our desire for spirit

The Ends of Life

“The Urge to End it All” is the title of an article in New York Times Magazine on suicide this past weekend. The article focuses on the difference between passion and premeditation, arguing that the people who choose the most fatal means—such as jumping or guns—tend to be the most impulsive. They are the least likely to have exhibited signs of mental illness. Rather, they tend to be overwhelmed by some acute blast of inner pain and unable to imagine a way out. If a ready method for ending the pain presents itself in the moment, they choose it. However, if the means is not easily secured, or made less accessible, they are not likely to find another means. They will, instead, find a way through.

One psychiatrist reported, after interviewing nine people who survived leaps from the Golden Gate Bridge: “What was immediately apparent… was that none of them had truly wanted to die. They had wanted their inner pain to stop; they wanted some measure of relief; and this was the only answer they could find. They were in spiritual agony, and they sought a physical solution.”
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The article reveals a crucial insight about our desire for spirit: learning to discern its wisdom, just as with our desires nourishment and physical intimacy, involves learning how to sense and respond to our own pain. For these feelings of life-threatening pain are our desires—in this case, expressions of our desires for life, for more life, for the life we want to live. It is because we want so much that we both hurt so much and want the pain to stop so much.

It is a paradox. Because we want more from life, we consider ending it. Without the desire for more, we wouldn’t care. Without the feeling of impossibility, we wouldn’t be willing to end it. Our pain is double—both desire and its impossibility—and in this double nature lies the secret to its wisdom.
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In learning to discern that wisdom, as in the case of the other desires, it is helpful to first debunk some myths. The first is that our desire for spirit will be satisfied by some thing—whether it be a promotion or an award, a piece of property or gadget, a second home, enough money, a passionate relationship, or a lean physique. We tend to believe that we will be happy if something happens and happy when something happens, hinging our happiness on that happening.

Happy if. Happy when.

But study after psychological study has shown that once we get what we think we want, our desire simply shifts to something else, and we find ourselves wanting again.

Our tendency then, if we tire of shifting objects, is to blame desire for being so fickle and transient, so restless and unsettling.

Desire is not the problem. The problem is that we make desire the problem.
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A second myth to debunk is that all we need to do is find the right answer, the right belief system, the right explanation for our suffering, and then we will be able to live happily. We turn to religious teachings and self-help gurus, to spiritual practices and paths in search of that worldview, the overarching picture of what is, that will enable us to make sense of the pain that dogs us. If we can secure such a meaning, whether political, religious, or scientific, we imagine, then we will be happy.

But there is no indication that true believers, the religious or spiritually inclined, the politically engaged or socially active, are any less prone to mental illness, depression, or suicide than those who are not.

Our desire for spirit wants more. But what?
*
Before me on the floor is a vast array of blocks and figures—big mega blocks, small mega blocks, wooden blocks, organized in squares, and buildings, populated by tiny animal figures, carefully lined, arranged, settled in their enclosures. Jessica and Kyra have set up a horse farm, in line with their dream of having 150 horses each, mostly thoroughbreds, and being jockeys. Or veterinarians. Jordan has a dairy farm featuring cows of all shapes and sizes.

We live on a farm. My kids play farm. When I had first noticed this, I had chuckled, especially when I had to interrupt their play at farm to get them to do farm. Time to feed the chickens! But I had quickly learned. This play is serious.

For my kids are not merely playing. They are acting out their visions for the future, but not any future. They are creating the world in which they want to live—a world that will provide them with everything they need to unfold their interests, use their skills, and become what and who they want to be. They are creating a world in which they are the ones with the power to name the animals and barns, their values and goals.

I look at the spread before me. Jordan, Jessica, and Kyra, crouched together in the middle, are surrounded with manure bunkers and watering troughs. They are setting up chore schedules and gathering appropriate tools, plowing fields and planting crops. Certainly, they are not “really” doing these things—they are pretending—but don’t tell them so. They feel as if they really are doing these tasks, and in some sense, they are right. For they are practicing the bodily patterns of thinking and feeling, planning and problem solving—the patterns of sensation and response—that they will need in order to be farmers. Their movements are making them into people for whom this desire for a farm is real and possible; they are testing and refining that desire at every turn. They do not want to be interrupted. For anything.
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The play of these children offers a clue to what we desire from our lives. They are children, yes, entertaining themselves in an imaginary world. They are also human beings, naming and bringing into being for themselves a world in which they can thrive. Their pleasure is palpable.

Just as our desire for food is a desire for an experience of being nourished; just as our desire for sex is a desire for an experience of giving and receiving a life-enabling touch; so it is time to consider that our desire for spirit is a desire to participate in the acts of naming and making real a world we love that loves us. It is the pleasure of participating in our own process of bodily becoming, creating and becoming the patterns of sensation and respond that will guide us in unfolding what we have to give.

This play is serious.

Next week: How our physio-spiritual pain teaches us to find the play in the moment.

Entwined Desires

I drove across New York State this past weekend to a conference outside of Rochester. Throughout the nearly six hour drive, I kept pressing the search button on my radio, surfing for local stations.

Friday morning’s results didn’t surprise me. With every search, I found a handful of morning shows, featuring rousing banter whose thinly veiled sexual innuendo framed rock songs sporting the same. The vibe was so similar from one station to the other. Some catchy title—The Point, The Rock, The Wall, The River; Star and Buzz—punctuated with a bright signature line, promised more music all the time. Between songs that told of of hearts meeting, beating, bleeding, and bleating; swooning croons, jealous anger, and pent up desire, the hosts—one woman and several men—laughed outrageously at their own off-color wit.

So too with every search I found a couple of Christian shows, featuring sermons that expounded on the importance of right relationship with God. Here male preachers spoke in rhythmic cadences, citing biblical authority as proof of the transforming power of God in our lives.

I remarked on the juxtaposition. Once. Then again. And again. Clear across the state, I found it, sex and spirit, alongside one another, parting the waves between them.

What do we desire?

On the way home, on Sunday afternoon, I tried my experiment again with similar results. This time, however, pop songs replaced the raunchy morning shows, and pop songs stood in for the sermons. Then it got interesting. Station to station, I heard the same yearning hearts—similar voices, instruments, phrasing, and emotional arcs. Even the titles seemed interchangeable.

Was “You Make Me Sing” offering praise to God or compliments to a handy partner? Was “Empty Me” a believer’s call for God to work wonders or a rapster’s call to an appealing chick?
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Our desires are entwined. Desire for physical intimacy. Desire for spiritual affirmation. As a scholar of religion, it shouldn’t surprise me. History is chock full of love songs to divine powers, and lovers worshipping their partners. Still, the degree of interpenetration in our culture is distinct. The patterns of sensation and response are the same, running the gamut from delight, anticipation, patience, and excitement, to longing, frustration, irritation, and anger. We want that feeling that fills us up and bubbles over in bliss. But what we want is not forthcoming as easily as we would prefer. We want more.
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More what? Desire for spirit? What do we desire when we desire “spirit”?

I use the word “spirit” because its meaning is deliciously multiple. It can refer to an entity like a god or goddess but also to an energy that moves inside us, inspiring us. There can be team spirit, school spirit, good spirits, raised spirits, and the spirit of Christmas, as well as Holy Spirit.

The span is intentional, for whether we see it as entity or energy, the effect on us is the same. The “spirit” we desire provides us with a sense of vitality, direction, and belonging, that together let us know that our lives our worthwhile. We know that who we are has value, for someone or something. Without such spirit, humans cannot live.

As with our desire for nourishment and physical intimacy, there is evidence too in contemporary culture that large proportions of people are not finding what they desire. The signature symptom is depression. A depressed person suffers from feeling no vitality, no sense of direction, and no connection to meaningful others. It is as if life force has leaked out, leaving nothing to fuel hope or action. What once seemed possible folds in and collapses upon you, a weight you cannot move.

Most people experience some degree of depression at some point in their lives. The proximate causes may range from traumatic loss, relentless stress, overwhelming anxiety, persistent loneliness or a lack of sleep, nutrients, or love. The symptoms can range from mild malaise to debilitating paralysis, and may clear up shortly or endure for years.

Our responses run the gamut as well. And here the comparison with our desires for food and sex is illuminating. For, as in these other realms, what we see dominating our cultural sensibility is a tendency to suspect our desires for more, and mobilize a mind-over-body sense of ourselves as our first and best line of defense. We want our discomfort to end, of course, and so we look to what we can acquire that will make the sensation quickly and completely disappear. We look for ways to distract, numb, or dazzle ourselves; we drug ourselves with substances ranging from sugar and caffeine to pornography and prozac. We look outside ourselves for the one true belief that will save us.

There is another way.
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In the next two months, we will be exploring this desire for spirit—how it manifests, how we respond, how it entwines with our desires for nourishment and intimacy. We will expose the mind-over-body logic that continues to loom large in how we sense and respond to this desire, and we will explore what a difference a shift to a perspective of bodily becoming makes.

As we shall see, when we know for ourselves that “I am the movement that is making me,” we have what we need to discern the wisdom in our desire for spirit. We can find in our feelings of depression, alienation, and despair a wisdom guiding us to create the relationships that will support us in unfolding what we have to give.

Reflection:
Think about it. What is it that gives you a sense of vitality?
When in a given day, week, or month, are you most likely to feel like your life matters?
With what communities or contexts or universes or worlds do you feel most connected?
How often do these things hover in your consciousness, at the horizons, below the surface, or in the center, enabling you to go on?